“What’s that?”
The lawyer put on a concentrated expression.
“I’ve wondered from the very beginning: let’s say that Bianca’s right, and that for some unknown reason Romualdo has lost his mind and has confessed to a murder he didn’t commit. Well, how did he know what had happened? He lives nowhere near the victim and it was the early hours of the morning, which means news of the murder was not yet publicly known. If it wasn’t him who did it, then how would he have known about the murder?”
Ricciardi had to admit to himself that he hadn’t considered that angle.
“That means the only explanation is that it was him, is that right? Or at least that he was present during the murder. Which would mean that the contessa is a liar.”
Moscato shrugged his shoulders, fanning himself with his hat all the while.
“Maybe she just fell asleep and didn’t hear Romualdo go out and come back. Or else she has the time wrong. Sometimes, Commissario, we believe what we want to believe, with all our might.”
Ricciardi sat a minute thinking. Then he said: “You see, Counselor, I’ve always cherished the belief that all the various motives that can lead to murder can actually be broken down into one of two, just two basic motives. I don’t believe in outbursts of madness, I don’t believe in perversion, I don’t believe in illusions. I believe that people kill either out of hunger or love. That what arms the killer’s hand is always either the determination to ensure his own survival and that of the people he loves, or else the passion that stirs a heart.”
Moscato stopped waving the hat and stared at the commissario as if he were laying eyes on him for the first time.
“Interesting theory. But I deal with lots of different kinds of people, you know, and I see some really strange things. Sometimes, there’s no motive at all. Sometimes a red haze settles over their gaze and they just stop thinking. You heard what Romualdo said, didn’t you? An unpredictable act, and therefore unexpected. He found himself face-to-face with a man who the day before had offended him, insulted him, had refused to give him more time to pay, and who might even have threatened to expose him to public mockery. These are things that might be sufficient to make you lose your sanity.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“And they might push you to grab someone by the neck, or punch him in the face. But would they drive you to grab a sharp object and stab him in the neck? Certainly, if you’re in a state of desperation it could happen. But you wouldn’t go home afterwards and go to sleep, and then get up the next morning and walk in and confess.”
The lawyer listened, attentively.
“And just what kind of hunger, in your opinion, can lead to a murder like this one? What kind of hunger can afflict someone who’s already lost everything, and by his own hand?”
Ricciardi said nothing, as he continued to follow the thread of his thoughts.
“Counselor, you’ve known Roccaspina since you were in school together. You grew up together and it’s clear that you’re on terms of great familiarity. Tell me something: Is he a man given to fits of rage? Is he a violent man, someone who has difficulty controlling himself? Can you think of any instances when you saw him react in an exaggerated manner? I beg you, make an effort to remember.”
Moscato sat raptly for a couple of minutes, turning over the years of friendship with Romualdo in his mind. In the end, he shook his head.
“No, Commissario. To be perfectly honest I don’t feel ready to describe Romualdo as a violent man. A man who operates on his instincts, yes, a sentimental man, given to outbursts of affection, generous and spontaneous to a fault, and I’d imagine that these characteristics could even turn into a predisposition to violence given certain desperate situations. But in all fairness, I can’t recall a single instance of him raising his hand to someone.”
Ricciardi nodded gravely.
“Tell me something else; I’m asking you this because perhaps, because of the profession you practice, you might be aware of situations that can’t be seen from the outside: in the circles that you frequent, except for the count, can you think of anyone else who might have had reasons for resentment against Piro?”
The lawyer burst into laughter.
“Commissario, are you joking? Piro was a social climber, a loan shark with a white collar, a character who was, to say the least, quite equivocal. He raised money from the institutions that he represented, and his sole interest was in making money; how he made it was no object, and he loaned that money out to debauchees who had fallen victims to various sins and bad habits. And in order to be certain he’d be paid back, he regularly threatened to diffuse the information that he possessed, in order to create scandals.”
“And so?”
“And so, believe me, there must have been at least a dozen people celebrating his death. But even if it had been one of them, the question remains: why should Romualdo have taken the blame for the murder?”
That was true, there was no getting around that question, and Ricciardi had no answer.
All theories eventually fetched up against that brick wall.
XXVI
The interior of the church of San Ferdinando still offered a pleasant sensation of coolness compared to the outdoors. That is the way it would remain until late October, Cavalier Giulio Colombo thought to himself as he dipped his fingers into the holy water font to cross himself.
He looked around, letting his eyes get used to the dim light. A shaft of multicolored light penetrated through the rose window on the façade and fell in the midst of the nave. Before the image of the Madonna, a small group of elderly women were reciting the rosary, as always, producing a constant murmuring. In the air was the penetrating odor of incense and candles. Nothing could be more reassuring, and yet Giulio was agitated, ill at ease, and would rather have been anywhere but there.
He’d never needed to force his basic nature. His work, his family, his few trusted friends didn’t require a personality any different from his own: calm, serenity, conviction, solid ideals, honesty, willingness to sacrifice, perhaps a little stubbornness, solicitude toward those who need a helping hand. Sure, every so often his wife would upbraid him for his extended silences, but she was already there to do all the talking, and she more than sufficed.
Nothing thus far had required that he modify his vision of life. Everything had always run on a highly buffed inclined plane, and if the cavalier had any real concerns, they came from outside, from a world that was taking a turn he didn’t like, with the growing militarism and those proclamations of the greatness of a nation struggling under a burden of debt to its own august past. All the same, Giulio was too old to fear being called to bear arms, and his eldest son was too young; as for Marco, his son-in-law, well, if things turned out that way it would be hard to hold him in check, fervent Fascist that he was.
But now something was happening that, perhaps, might require an intervention to change the natural flow of events.
The conversation that he’d had the day before with Enrica had thrown him into a profound state of anguish.
If she had asked him for help, if she had burst into tears, if she had told him she planned to run away, he would have had no doubts and would have known just what to do: against everything and everyone he would have fought for his daughter, saving her from her mother, from social conventions, from the squalor of a reasoning that had little or nothing of the sentimental about it.
Likewise, if he had glimpsed in those eyes so similar to his own a resolve devoid of uncertainty, if he had perceived a firm heart, unwilling to look back, then he too, like the rest of the family, would only have been impatient to meet this much ballyhooed Bavarian officer, and he would have fought to stifle his own prejudices against Germany and the Germans.
The problem, the cavalier reflected for the umpteenth time, sharpening his myopic gaze in the direction of the altar, was that E
nrica hadn’t convinced him one way or the other. More than decisive, she seemed to be resigned. And he wasn’t willing to accept that his eldest daughter, his beloved, sweet little girl, the companion of gazes both complicit and silent, was having to resign herself.
The risk of unhappiness, Giulio Colombo thought to himself, feeling a stab of pain in his chest, is still better than forced serenity. Strange that he of all people should have that kind of thought, he who always seemed to be cocooned in a tranquility laboriously constructed and defended with claws and teeth. But the future that he wanted for Enrica was different, it didn’t admit any hesitations, because the cavalier was well aware that wholehearted laughter, a heart that flies high over the clouds, the deep breath that you take as you enjoy life all exist only outside of the tiny, orderly cell of everyday certainties.
That is why he had gone to the church. He’d thought it over all night long, pretending to sleep lest Maria’s antennae swivel into alert, picking up on variations in his rate of respiration, or other indicators of his state of mind.
Not that he was particularly religious. His pragmatic liberal mind, his logic had taken him far from the banks of a faith which he sometimes missed. He took his family to Mass every Sunday, he watched over the Catholic education of his children, and he adhered to principles that fully coincided with Christian precepts. Still, he felt that it was up to the individual to construct his own best fate, albeit in full respect of his fellow man. He couldn’t imagine the existence of Someone who, according to vast and inscrutable designs, moved the world and everything in it like a puppeteer at the Villa Nazionale on a Saturday afternoon.
Precisely because he had faith in his fellow man, that was why he was there. He had decided that if there was anyone capable of telling him what to do, and even helping him to put a strategy into operation, it was surely Don Pietro Fava, the assistant parish priest. Don Pierino, to be clear.
The shop’s proximity to the parish church, just a short walk away, and the fact that the diminutive priest was so talkative and in such constant motion, had led Giulio Colombo to form a friendship with him.
The two of them didn’t resemble each other in the slightest: one was tall, formal, silent, and secular; the other was short, always in motion, noisy, and—especially—profoundly enamored of God, whose presence he detected everywhere. And yet they had immediately found common territory where they could meet, in the realms of music, books, art, and people, sentiments, and also politics, with an emphasis on peace and dialogue. Don Pierino often came to see the cavalier and, if he happened to find him unoccupied by customers, he’d drag him into lengthy and highly amusing conversations, which would however be cut off abruptly when the priest opened his eyes wide at the sight of the time on the shop’s large pendulum clock, whereupon he would shout a rough farewell and hurry off to administer some unpostponable pastoral comfort to a needy parishioner.
That day it was Giulio who needed him.
He found the priest in the sacristy, with his eyeglasses on the tip of his nose, intently stitching up a tear in his tunic.
Colombo smiled, shaking his head.
“But by all that is holy, Don Pierino, haven’t I told you a thousand times that if you ever need to have work like this done, you need only come to see me? I have a seamstress on salary to take care of alterations to gloves and hats, and she’s often sitting there with nothing to do. She’d be all too happy if we gave her something to work on.”
The man of God looked up, peering over his lenses.
“Oh, Cavalier, what an honor! You know that I love to stitch and iron, I have the soul of a housewife. But you, rather, what are you doing here? Have you had a sudden calling to become a cloistered monk and you’d like some advice on how to break the news to your delightful lady wife?”
Colombo took a chair pushed against the wall and sat down.
“Not exactly, maybe some other time. Certainly, the prospect is an interesting one. But today I’m here about another matter, Don Pierino. Something that’s been weighing on my heart.”
His tone of voice, more than his words, worried the priest, who immediately put aside the torn tunic, the needle, and the thread, and took off his glasses.
“What’s going on, Giulio? There’s a look on your face I’ve never seen before.”
The cavalier heaved a sigh and ran a hand over his face. Now that he was face-to-face with his friend, he was starting to think that bringing him into the matter was an act of selfishness, and possibly pointless as well: What could a priest tell him about a problem that involved a woman’s emotions?
“I don’t know. Maybe it was a mistake to come here, forgive me. It’s just that . . . sometimes we need to speak aloud about what’s churning in our heads. That’s all.”
Don Pierino smiled.
“And do you think I don’t know that? Things don’t become real until you speak them aloud. It’s necessary. Words are body, blood: If we priests don’t know that, then who does? We celebrate the Word. And from dawn to dusk, in confession, we see people understand the things they have done only in the moment that they hear their own voices recount them.”
“Then do you think I should say confession?”
The other man replied seraphically.
“Goodness gracious, no. In confession, you’re just a crashing bore, never an impure act, never a wicked thought. And to think that you shopkeepers are all thieves deep down inside. Just talk to me.”
So Giulio Colombo talked.
He started from the beginning. Of course, Don Pierino had known Enrica for years, but he still felt the need to describe her personality, her attitudes. He told him about last summer, the letters, the distress. He told him that he had confronted the man about whom his daughter had written him, the short conversation that they had had. About what had happened next, that is, how she had met Manfred, her return home, and the conversation he and his daughter had had just the previous day.
He allowed his deep-felt, instinctive conviction to emerge that his daughter, in spite of what she might tell him—and perhaps she was just trying to keep him from worrying—in the secret spaces of her soul might be condemning herself to a dull, persistent, morbid state of unhappiness.
Don Pierino listened all the while in silence. If there was one thing he had learned in his many years of priesthood, it was that people had a need to be listened to. In the end he reached out his hand and laid it on his friend’s arm; Giulio had become so heartfelt as spoke about a person he loved so well that he hadn’t even realized that his eyes were reddened with deep emotion. Without any real reason why, but following the hidden path of an impulse, Don Pierino asked the name of the man Enrica was in love with.
Giving voice to a hidden thought, Giulio Colombo knocked down the last wall of his personal reserve.
The name fell into a rapt silence. From the half-open door into the sacristy came the monotonous litany of the little old ladies.
Don Pierino nodded, pensively.
“I know him. I know Commissario Ricciardi. And this explains a great many things.”
XXVII
It was already late afternoon when a barefoot boy wearing a tattered sleeveless shirt at least four sizes too big for him came dashing into the guardroom, on the ground floor of police headquarters.
He was panting and at least twenty seconds ahead of Amitrano, the officer on duty at the front entrance. The scugnizzo looked around proudly. His skin was brown as old leather, his knees were ravaged by scrapes and cuts, he had the marks of ancient chilblains on his feet, and he was absolutely filthy.
“Brigadier Raffaele Maione!” he said in a loud voice. “Who here is him?”
Amitrano grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, hauling him off the floor and wheezing.
“Rude thing, little animal, let me show you right now just what happens when you forget to stop at the front door, I should have just shot you i
n the legs . . . ”
Maione, who was compiling the duty roster for the following day, wearily raised his hand.
“Amitra’, just drop it. I’d be curious to see what happens the day that an actual ill-intentioned individual manages to slip in here, maybe to take vengeance for an arrest or a simple stop. Whether or not you’re standing watch at the door seems to be immaterial.”
The boy, who wasn’t even remotely intimidated, said in a hoarse voice: “It’s true, we can get in here whenever we like. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Maione raised his voice.
“Hey, now, don’t you even think of it, understood? Or I’ll kick you black and blue in the seat of the pants so you won’t be able to sit down again as long as you live! Amitra’, let go of him for a second and let me hear what he has to say. Then slam him in a cell for a month, so we can see who’s afraid of who!”
The boy rubbed his neck, glaring ferociously at the officer who was keeping his eye on him.
“Oh sure, do you think I’m stupid? You can’t put me in jail because I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve only come because I have a message to deliver to this certain Brigadier Raffaele Maione, and they paid me to deliver it. Otherwise, I never would have come to catch a whiff of the stink in this place!”
Maione advanced, towering over the boy, who however showed no signs of fear.
“What about, instead of putting you in jail, I knock you black and blue and pound you silly? Then I’ll just say that you fell down the stairs while we were chasing you, because you’d scampered into police headquarters without stopping when told to halt by Amitrano here. Come on, shall we make a bet?”
The subdued tone of voice and the determined expression, more than the sheer size of the brigadier, convinced the boy that he’d dragged it out long enough.
“Well, so you’re Brigadier Raffaele Maione?”
Glass Souls Page 19